Glenn Greenwald published the first article in The Guardian based on documents leaked by Edward Snowden, revealing a top-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) order requiring Verizon to hand over all telephone metadata to the National Security Agency on an "ongoing, daily basis." The order, dated April 25, 2013, required Verizon to provide the NSA with information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the U.S. and between the U.S. and other countries.
The metadata included the numbers of both parties on each call, location data, call time, duration, and unique identifiers, covering over 120 million Verizon subscribers. Notably, the order did not authorize the NSA to collect the content of communications, only the metadata. This revelation marked the beginning of a series of disclosures that would fundamentally transform the public debate about privacy, security, and government surveillance in the digital age.
The disclosure represented the first concrete evidence of the massive scale of NSA surveillance programs targeting ordinary Americans with no suspected connection to terrorism, directly challenging government claims that surveillance was narrowly targeted at foreign threats. The revelation sparked immediate constitutional concerns about Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.